dotMobi

Webby Event at NYC

On Tuesday January 23rd, dotMobi sponsored a happy hour with the Webby's at the W Hotel in Union Square, NYC.  I was there with both Neil Edwards, CEO and Vance Hedderel, Dir. of PR and Communications and members of the Academy.  It was a relaxed and low-key networking event for the professionals from the creative and advertising agencies, and media who support the Webbys.  These pictures are curtesy of the Webby's. More pictures are posted here.

BTW dotMobi is the sponsor of the first ever Mobile Webby Awards.  (A little bit more here.) The deadline for submissions was today Jan 26th. I am looking forward to celebrating the achievement of this years winners, highlighting the prioneering talents of the best and brightest in mobile content.

WSJ On Mobile Advertising

Every day, it seems, there is news in the trade press about innovations taking place around mobile technology.  There’s no doubt that momentum continues to build around mainstream adoption of a host of new services that are being offered over mobile devices.         

In fact, this week The Wall Street Journal featured a front page article on mobile advertising. (Free to non-subscribers as I write this.)  The article entitled "Companies Vie for Ad Dollars on Mobile Web" described mobile advertising as the next Internet gold rush.

That may be true, but, in my opinion, not in the near-term.

Although mobile advertising shows promise as a new channel to reach consumers, there are still significant challenges in place to stymie its wide-scale acceptance by mobile subscribers. 

First, there are the cultural challenges. Consumers have shown a propensity to protect their privacy when it comes to their mobile devices.  Studies indicate that consumers in general feel a personal connection to their phones that limit their willingness to provide open access to potentially invasive advertising.

For those that have opened the doors, there are stories of consumers being bombarded by ads they can’t stop but continue to pay for.  The mobile operators claim they can control this problem by promoting only advertisers that appear on their decks. There may be truth to that. However, the “lingering doubts” that consumer’s have about “mobile spam” must first be overcome before you’ll see the kind of growth in mobile advertising that is being hyped in the trade press these days.

The next challenge is legislation.  As usual, technology has advanced well ahead of the legislation that is designed to protect consumers. Although the technology exists to support mobile advertising, legislation lags around content quality and privacy concerns that are sure to become key issues as mobile advertising becomes more prevalent.  In the past, mobile operators have been primarily responsible for monitoring content that is carried over their networks.  But as we continue to move toward an “open mobile web” where more advertising dollars are involved, the likelihood that content quality will deteriorate seems quite high. 

Of course, there are many other challenges (e.g., device limitations, revenue models, on-deck/off-decks issues, etc.) that seem likely to slow mainstream adoption of mobile advertising over the next few years.  However, there is no doubt that mobile technology has huge market potential for advertisers to interact with consumers in new and different ways.

Is it the start of the next Internet gold rush?  I guess that remains to be seen.

dotMobi Premium Names Update

As you’ve seen previously on this blog, dotMobi released our first set of Premium Names last October. Since then we’ve been working hard to make sure relevant content is developed behind those names … as we are with all registered .mobi names. And late last year, we announced our first Request for Proposal (RFP) process for news.mobi, ringtones.mobi, sports.mobi and weather.mobi. Anyone can apply for one, two or all four of these names as long as you follow the process. The deadline to file is February 16, 2007. We plan to continue offering Premium Names via RFP – as well as by live and online auction – in 2007.

Since this is a new way of allocating names, speculation and rumor sometimes results – from questions about how the funds received are used to false dotMobi announcements.

One thing I can tell you is that dotMobi is a business: our business is making the Internet mobile. That means a lot of our time is spent helping developers build sites by supplying them with free tools and free education; building and distributing those tools is where a large piece of that money goes. It also goes to helping educate the marketplace about the opportunities of the internet made mobile.

Another thing I should mention is that a rumor appeared on some domain industry news sites last week about an upcoming online auction of dotMobi Premium Names in February. Unfortunately, that is not true and no online auction is planned for February. Any auction (or allocation via other methods) of any dotMobi Premium Names will always be announced officially by dotMobi and will be viewable at http://dotmobi.mobi

What does the iPhone mean for dotMobi?

A quick word of introduction: I'm James Pearce, the new dotMobi CTO. I've been working with the mobile web for over seven years now, and I'm excited about this. 2007 feels like it really could be the year that the mobile web starts to build up momentum.

A number of people have discussed the impact of Apple's iPhone announcement on the purpose of the .mobi top-level domain. For my first post, I thought it would be an intriguing topic to tackle.

In short, the iPhone can only be good for all of us - the .mobi domain included.

Firstly, the launch. Steve Jobs is the ultimate technology showman, and with his keynote, he showed that he can bring glamour, excitement, and design credibility - not to mention sheer consumer glee - to the mobile phone industry. The column inches the iPhone has garnered in a few days must surely have been a wake up call to every other handset manufacturer. Many of them have brands that you would hardly call weak, and yet the buzz from this one manufacturer about this one device has been enviable in almost all respects.

The device itself is certainly exciting, and exactly the sort of gadget you'd expect from Apple. I won't run through the lengthy specifications here ;-) but it's clearly designed with more than plain voice telephony in mind. The device appears to have a very balanced approach to its three main functions: phone, internet device and wide-screen iPod. (Indeed Jobs teased his audience by suggesting he was going to be announcing three separate products).

For all us mobile web fans, one area of particular interest is the browser. The phone runs a limited variant of Apple's desktop operating system, OS X, and hence the iPhone will be shipped with the platform's Safari browser. Jobs really played this up at the show, showing how rich web sites could be accessed, and positioning the browser's support for AJAX: "we've got Google Maps!".

But wait a second... Safari is based on the WebKit browser project. And so is the S60 browser. And the S60 browser appears on many Symbian handsets today, and has done for almost a year. Can it really be true that Steve Jobs' fully-fledged-browser-on-a-phone story is not so innovative after all?

Well, yes. I've been a fan of the S60 browser (on the Nokia N80 phone) since last spring. I've been able to access rich, complex web sites on it. And yes, I've been using Google Maps too! So a glib answer to the question about how the iPhone affects dotMobi is... that it affects it in exactly the same way as many of today's phones do.

And that way, I believe, is positive.

How so? Well, if one believes that dotMobi is only concerned about ensuring bijou web pages for limited devices, then my position may be hard to understand. Why access a lightweight .mobi site when your browser (S60, Safari, whatever) supports arbitrary, heavy-weight .com sites? (Although there's currently an easy answer to that too - at least if you're not on a flat-rate data tariff :-) )

But here's the thing. I believe .mobi is about so much more than just small, compliant markup that will reliably work on all handsets. It's also about the context of mobility: it's about a web user inferring that the provider of the site has thought through what he or she, on the move, wants to do on that site.

Or to put it another way, with an acid test: if I was on the move, was running Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 on my phone, and I knew that the site I want has both .com and .mobi addresses, which would I choose?

It's easy: device and browser regardless, I still want to go to the site that targets my particular context (a human on the move). And that would be the .mobi address.

Which might suggest that the iPhone makes no difference to dotMobi! But that's not true either. Don't forget the marketing power of the Apple brand - coupled with the extent to which many anticipate they will be promoting the iPhone as a mobile web device. That will undoubtedly give the meme of accessing data services from a mobile greater and greater mass market acceptance. Everyone who thought they were simply upgrading their iPod (or just upgraded their mobile subscription to get an elegant new phone) will in fact be signing up to Apple's vision of mobile web access.

Suddenly the mobile web will be default. Suddenly the mobile web will be accessible. Suddenly the mobile web will be cool.

And for that reason alone, the iPhone is great for dotMobi - and of course great for the mobile web as a whole.

dotMobi At CES

I am currently at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.  CES was first held in 1967 with 200 television and radio manufacturers showcasing their products.  What a long way it has come -- it's now the world's largest annual consumer technology event with over 2,700 exhibitors covering over 1.7 million square feet of space. You cannot get a sense of how big this show is without actually being here. 

CES used to be about consumer electronic gadgets of all kinds, but things have changed somewhat. The overriding theme is about the gadgets that deliver content, and gadgets that are integrated so that content traditionally meant to be delivered say by your PC is now on your mobile phone or TV.

This means mobile phones that can stream satellite radio, play MP3s, browse the Internet, and (oh, BTW) place a phone call.  Its about huge 108-inch flat panel TVs that can access movies, music, and photos from your PC.  There were TVs debuted from HP that can access your music library and photos direct from your PC as well as download movie clips. Samsung's huge booth, showcased a variety of mobile phones that could double as your music player, digital camera and Internet access. 

The only thing I missed was seeing the new Apple iPhone. Too bad since the theme of device and content integration would have suited them quite well. Of course, they were at the MacWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

We were represented by our CEO Neil yesterday at the CES Panel: "Mobile Commerce and Content: The Mobile Web, Off Deck Content, Mobile Search and Advertising Options."  The others on the panel were:

• Larry Shapiro, Executive Vice President, Business Development and Operations, Walt Disney Internet Group;
• Eric Harber, VP of Corporate and Business Development, Qpass;
• Brian Dunphy, Senior Director of Brand & Affinity Relations, QUALCOMM Internet Services (QIS);
• Lee Hancock, Chief Executive Officer and founder, go2; and
• Tammy Franklin, Vice President, Business Development, Turner Broadcasting System. 

One of the interesting issues that were brought up had to do with the difficulty for content providers who have to tailor "on deck" content for a variety of mobile operators, who each have a different set of "standards" for displaying the content.  This of course is exactly the issue that we solve, namely one set of interoperable standards that are industry-backed and which enable any content provider to go mobile.

Tammy Franklin made a particularly notable comment in response to the difficulties of monetizing content, namely advertising.  It was a quiet comment, but very wise: "Before we worry about monetizing, its important to grow the industry."

In other words, lets grow the available mobile content, make it compelling enough so warrant traffic from end users, then lets figure out how best to monetize it. 

Couldn't agree more...

My Predictions For 2007

The new year is here and, as always, this is a time for reflections...and predictions.  I will leave the prediction of market size, mergers and acquisitions to the analysts.  But based on this years news and trends, here are my predictions for 2007:

First: 2007 will see the growth of off-portal mobile content, as well as pressures on carriers to open up the "walled gardens." My prediction is based on the following data points:

• Increased penetration of devices which support WAP 2.0 delivers the wireless web to the device owners.
  • Early WAP experiments were correctly criticized for delivering a bad user- experience for browsing Internet content on mobile devices, However the increased availability handsets with color screens that support WAP 2.0 (xHTML) deliver the elusive wireless web to the hands of the users.  According to MMetrics "owners of devices that support WAP 2 are more than 63% more likely to use the browser feature on their handset than subscribers with handsets that support earlier versions of the protocol. In 2005 the installed base of WAP 2 phones has expanded significantly from about 33% of all WAP phones in January to about 48% in August. Over the same period the installed base of devices that support WAP has expanded to about 124 million devices in August from 118 million in January".
• Increased availability of high-bandwidth infrastructure such as 3G worldwide will remove one barrier (slow access for users ) while putting pressure on carriers to increase data ARPU from their subscriber base via other means than just SMS and limited browsing on their walled gardens
• 3's recent announcement of a flat rate data plan will up the competitive ante for other carriers to consider the same.  Note that in their announcement, 3's Christian Salbaing, Managing Director of European telecom at 3 noted "The mobile internet has now developed to such a degree that we can now leave the 'walled garden' behind and let our customers access and enjoy the very best of what the converged internet and media worlds can offer."
• Industry wide efforts, such as ours, that will enable content providers and developers large and small to create their own mobile content site that is available regardless of handset or operator limitations, thus lowering the cost of entry.
• Major brands will look to mobile as a new marketing channel, as a direct to consumer model looks increasingly attractive.According to an independent survey of 50 brands commissioned by Airwide: "By 2008, 89% of brands will use text and multimedia messaging to reach their audience, with nearly one-third planning to spend in excess of 10% of marketing budgets on the medium. In five years over half of brands (52%) expect to spend between 5% and 25% of total marketing budget on mobile marketing."
• Issues such as "net neutrality" and control of content are debated not just in the PC context, but also increasingly in the mobile world as operators will face scrutiny of their content control via a walled garden strategy.
   

As these factors begin to converge, operators (particularly US ones who have been lagging behind the European and Asian counterparts), will need to reconsider the longevity of walled gardens as a strategy, not only to respond to consumer demand, but also to bolster their own business case of avoiding becoming just a data pipe long term.

The above is actually a few predictions summed up into one. But, while we are on the subject of predictions, lets add some more. In no particular order after the jump: